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How Well Do You Really Understand your Customer’s Experience?

Jessica is responsible for the Customer Experience practice at Tribridge and has many certifications Read More

Businesses may have an understanding about their customer preferences or needs, but there is often less insight into the customer's perception of their experience. Journey mapping is a tool used to understand customer goals and how they go about getting it. Mapping each customer interaction or transaction "touch point" during their journey, from awareness through sales and service, from the point of view of the customer, identifies the strongest and weakest touch points. In order to improve customer experience by implementing a customer relationship management (CRM) solution, it’s important to have a clear understanding of the customer's current experience, as well as the desired experience.

There are two important perspectives to consider when deploying CRM – that of the employee using the new solution and the customer they are serving. Journey mapping can reveal customer obstacles and affirm opportunities to improve alignment of business processes to best equip employees to serve customers.

Internally, your sales, marketing, customer service, technical support and contact center teams may be relying on disparate, specialty software to manage information. Fragmented data spread across silos, results in valuable time wasted searching for information needed to plan campaigns, forecasting sales, responding to customer inquiries and resolving service and support issues.

A CRM solution provides a centralized location for customer information, enabling timely access to customer interactions and transaction information. Shared visibility for all employees allows for faster and more accurate responses to customers, opportunities to manage customer feedback, access to data- data that can be sliced in insightful ways and used to measure results against key metrics.

Provide a Seamless, Consistent Customer Experience with CRM

A great customer experience must be synchronized, consistent and reliable. Understanding your customer's journey, and every touch point across every channel, will likely reveal disconnections or friction that can be removed.

Consider all of the channels a customer may use to reach out: phone, email, website, chat, social media, or in person.

Will their experience be consistent regardless of the channel they choose to use?

If a customer changes channels mid-interaction, can another channel pick- up support without the customer repeating steps they've already taken?

Do you require a customer switch channels to complete sales, service, or support requests?

Customers are looking for low effort experiences; they don't want to be transferred from person-to-person or sit on hold waiting for support. While customer satisfaction may not always equate to loyalty, experience dissatisfaction does equate to disloyalty!

CRM offers two-pronged improvement for both the internal employee experience and the customer experience. Capitalize on these opportunities to improve by journey mapping both experiences, then deploying a CRM solution to provide the most customer-relevant improvements.

Download the eBook “10 Days to CRM Success,” and contact Tribridge for additional guidance with journey mapping and ensuring your CRM solution meets the needs of both your employees and your customers.